Thoughts on HIMMS meeting

Attended the HIMMS meeting in Chicago a few weeks ago. Ole Eichorn over at The Daily Scan has a very nice report as well (with better pictures).  Enjoyed Ole's talk (one of the few related specifically to specialty of pathology).  Lot of interest among hospital IT folks about capacity, bandwidth, security, archiving image needs and compatibility between different systems as well as DICOM compliance for whole slide images in pathology.  From my perspective, they seem to understand this is technology they may need to support in their institutions and were asking very pertinent questions. 

No discusion about image resolution for clinical use, images being too large to manage or ability to serve images.  Discussion much more focused on understanding what needs to be done to support the technology.

Telemedicine was a large part of the program including the number and scale of exhibitor booths.

Can you imagine having mimes at the next USCAP meeting?

Harris Corporation had a booth and demonstrated their technology to move whole slide images and view them rapidly over satellite communication with BioImagene slides.  Very fast viewing of whole slide images without any tiling or pixelation with satellite communication from remote serve.

Apollo PACS (who have recently re-designed their website) exhibited at the meeting as well as dozens of other PACS companies.  I spoke with several and asked about what they were doing considering whole slide images in pathology.  Most had no idea what I was talking about, what a pathology slide was and what whole slide scanning or digital pathology involves.  Despite that they all said the same thing, "If it is DICOM, we can do it." 

All in all, the highlight of the meeting for me was hearing Dr. Jerry Linenger speak who gave one of the closing keynotes (Alan Greenspan gave the other).  Picked up one of Dr. Linenger's books since ("Off the Planet") and recommend if space travel interests you.